In Joan Steinau Lester’s new memoir, Loving Before Loving: A Marriage in Black and White, the charged topics of race and gender discrimination are through lines, weaving the whole of her life together. Lester could have screamed and shouted the ugly history that accompanies both topics, piling on one outrage after another. Countless pages could have been devoted to heart-wrenching facts and despairing statistics. Instead, Lester drew upon her involvement with the late 1960s women’s movement, which was born from storytelling: women gathering and telling each other about their lives.
It’s a personal, colloquial style that invites the reader to listen and, almost as an afterthought, learn. The memoir is about her marriage to the Black writer Julius Lester in 1962, her activism in the racial justice and gender justice movements, and Lester’s evolution as a writer.
“It’s a natural style for me,” says Lester. “I came into my voice in the ’70s when I, and a lot of women, were publishing first-person essays about the difficult subjects of gender and race.” Writers who have influenced her style are Adrienne Rich, Tillie Olsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Grace Paley. “I was drawn to their unadorned, everyday language, and the telling of urgent stories,” says Lester. “Although Hurston had extraordinary images, many were drawn from the speech of her people, African Americans, and certainly the rhythm derives from colloquial Black speech.”
The writing is not laden with adjectives or modifying phrases or clauses. It’s a style that is more aware of content than stylistic technique. Here’s an example from Lester’s involvement in 1960 at a protest in front of Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina, which had a whites-only counter.
Dressed in our respectable best—skirts and heels for the women, suits for men—we walked in a circle chanting, “End lunch counter discrimination!” I called it out until my voice was hoarse, but my spirit grew stronger the longer we stayed. “Every Saturday I’ll be here,” I vowed to a minister behind me in the circle.
Yet it isn’t completely unadorned. Throughout, Lester adds imagery and subtext through metaphor, what James Wood in How Fiction Works calls “little explosions of fiction within the larger fiction of the novel or story.”
“They slip out by themselves,” says Lester. “That said, I have a very deliberative process. After a draft, I may revise 50 times, lying awake at night, wondering if I used the right word, the right phrasing or image.”
After living with Julius in New York City and prior to their marriage, Lester felt an almost primal need to abide by Virginia Woolf’s advice and find a room of her own.
I hardly know what I envisioned, but the idea wouldn’t let go: living in New York at twenty-two, alone. A freedom I only sensed, like an animal finding its way in the dark, knowing what it needed for survival.
The ending of her marriage to Julius flung her on an emotional rollercoaster. She tried to find her grounding as a single mother with two children. She consulted a psychiatrist who prescribed thorazine. After one pill, Lester was so woozy and disoriented, she vowed to figure it out herself. She wrote furiously and sought solace in nature. In the following passage, Lester associates nature with the medicinal.
I soaked up the earth, its rich loamy aroma grounding me. I wept at the beauty of sky medicine, its brilliant blue pulsing into my chest. Cloud medicine. I drank every drop in the bottle.
And in this example, Lester becomes like a wounded animal:
As I spiraled downward and grew unable to read or concentrate even on a newspaper, I wandered the woods and wrote, spewing pain, turning bits into poetry and letting the rest hang loose like entrails from a dying horse.
I asked Lester for her favorite sentence.
I refused to end up like the women Virginia Woolf described in A Room of One’s Own, those who never got their words on paper, “possessed” women who dashed their brains out on the moor, crazed with the lack of space or time to write.
“I love the sentence for a few reasons,” Lester explained. “First, it’s always an honor to quote Woolf, who was so prescient and devoted to women’s creative needs. Second, I love the declarative strength of my own determination: I would not end up shriveled or even dead from lack of ability to express my soul’s longings. I would find a path. And finally, I adore the dramatic image Woolf chose of “possessed” women dashing out their brains. Its violence, in that bleak setting, conveys exactly the degree of cruelty meted out to women so often denied “space or time” to write. Mothers, poor and working-class women of every ethnic group, women gaslighted about their supposed lack of talent; women have suffered so extremely from lack of creative recognition that I found this a vivid way to voice that.”
For some writers, the public display of the private, the exposure of the flaws and failures can make the writing arduous, even impossible. But at 81 years old, Lester says she has the freedom not to care what others think of her. “What I’ve come to realize is that what really matters is what I think of myself,” she says. “In this book I trusted that people would want a true story, one written honestly, as if I’m telling them stories of my long life.”
There was a difficult part to write, however. The epilogue brings the book to the present day and Black Lives Matter and the killing of George Floyd. Her first draft was primarily expository about the history of social change movements, especially the Black Liberation Movement and how it led to this present moment.
“I thought it was very informative to trace the history leading to Black Lives Matter, and how in the past the leadership was male, and this time the movement was women-led,” says Lester. “But it was too great a tonal shift. The entire book had been personal, story-driven and then there was this radically different tone.”
In its place, she includes her personal response to the murder of Floyd. She wrote blogs and offered her mostly white neighbors copies of her book, The Future of White Men and Other Diversity Dilemmas. She made a Black Lives Matter banner, strung it across her driveway, and placed two chairs, six feet apart. She sat, waiting for her neighbors to stroll by. And they did come. Over 30 people took a copy of her book. And one came back, again and again, to talk about racism. Her memoir guarantees that the conversation will not disappear or go silent.